Abstract
Public institutions increasingly procure AI systems whose design they cannot inspect or change. In higher education, proprietary Early Warning Systems (EWS) leave colleges with few options beyond adjusting model outputs to address inequity. This raises the question of how fairness work is coordinated among vendors, institutions, advisors, and students with unequal power to change these systems? Using student records from a public college in Ontario, Canada, we evaluate six post-hoc fairness interventions on a research EWS under simulated procurement constraints. We compare fairness, accuracy, and demographic disparities, introducing error-type profiling to trace how interventions redistribute false positives and false negatives. Interventions redistributed disparities without consistently reducing them. Two implementations favored already-advantaged groups because they used group size to define disadvantage; small, marginalized groups remained poorly served. These findings show how procurement constraints and implementation choices shape the possibilities for fairness work. We call the resulting condition fairness theatre; dashboard metrics converge while groups' error burdens persist or worsen.
Keywords
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Publication details
- Journal
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- Open access
- Green open access
Cite this article
APA 7
McConvey, K., Zhai, A., Li, R., & Guha, S. (2026). Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems
MLA 9
McConvey, Kelly, et al. "Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems.
Chicago (author–date)
McConvey, Kelly, Angelina Zhai, Rebecca Li, and Shion Guha. 2026. "Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems." https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems.
Harvard
McConvey, K., Zhai, A., Li, R. and Guha, S. (2026) 'Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems', Available at: https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems.
Vancouver
McConvey K, Zhai A, Li R, Guha S. Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems. https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems
IEEE
K. McConvey, A. Zhai, R. Li, and S. Guha, "Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems," https://omanscience.com/en/articles/fairness-theatre-evaluating-post-hoc-fairness-interventions-in-vendor-controlled-early-warning-systems.